Monday, June 16, 2014

Staunton, June 16 – Attacks in
Russia on gastarbeiters from Central Asia and the Caucasus are a major reason
for a 20 percent decline in the number of such immigrants over the last year,
and human rights experts predict that the rising tide of xenophobia there will
increase the frequency and possible violence of such attacks in the future.

That trend may be one of the reasons
behind Moscow’s decision to welcome more Chinese workers into the Russian
Federation, but allowing more Chinese workers in could easily trigger increased
fears among Russians about China’s intentions about Russia’s territorial
integrity and new attacks on Chinese gastarbeiters.

For the time being, Russian migration
officials are suggesting that any Chinese who do come bill be more disciplined
and better behaved in a Russian context than
those who have come from the former Soviet republics, although it remains to be
seen whether such suggestions will turn out to be true.

Konstantin Romodanovsky, head of the
Federal Migration Service, said on Saturday that he does “not want” to predict “anything
horrible” about the influx of Chinese workers to Russia at least some of whom
will fill jobs left by the 20 percent decline in the number of Central Asian
and Caucasian gastarbeiters (newsru.com/russia/14jun2014/chinaimmigrants.html).

He said that the Chinese are
law-abiding and well-controlled by their brigade leaders and their diaspora
communities, something that has not always been the case with gastarbeiters
from former Soviet republics.The
decline in the number of the latter, he suggested, reflected better Russian law
enforcement against illegals rather than anything else.

But other experts on migration
suggest that the decline in the number of Central Asian and Caucasian workers
in Russia reflects at least in part negative Russian attitudes to them,
attitudes that at least in principle could be displaced onto Chinese
gastarbeiters if the latter become numerous and prominent in Russian cities.

In an article on the “Russkaya
planeta” portal, Karomat Sharipov, the head of the All-Russian Tajik
Gastarbeiter Movement, is quoted as saying that the number of Tajik dying in
Moscow increased from 428 in 2012 to “more than 500” this year, figures that
are comparable to those in the war zone of Afghanistan (rusplt.ru/society/migratsiya--fabrika-smerti-10401.html).

Most of the Tajik deaths are among
the young, people who have not been accustomed to using medical services in
Tajikistan, he says, and who “do not have access to free medical care” in the
Russian Federation.” And many of these deaths are the result of clashes among
the gastarbeiters. He said Russian nationalist attacks on the community had
recently fallen.

But other Moscow experts disagree.
Natalya Yudina of the SOVA rights center, acknowledges that the number of
attacks by Russian extremists on Central Asians has declined largely because
media denunciations of Ukrainians have given them a different focus. But “nonetheless,
the number of attacks all the same remains high.”

She said that the growth of
xenophobia over the last year has been in part “connected with the broad
anti-immigration campaign by the authorities.”That “has created fertile soil for nationalists” whether the authorities
specifically intended that message of not.

Aleksandr Verkhovsky, the director
of SOVA, added that “after the events in Ukraine, the authorities have not been
as active in opposing the ultra-nationalists. Instead, what the authorities have
been doing with their talk about “the struggle with propaganda of Nazis” has
been to give “the appearance” that they are doing something which they are not.

And he said that the data collected
by his organization show that deaths among Central Asian gastarbeiters in
Russia as a result of attacks by ultra-nationalists “will be larger in 2014”
than they were last year, a trend that may not change just become the ethnic
composition of those workers changes in favor of the Chinese.